Swisscom announced that it is setting up a Swiss-wide additional network for the Internet of Things(IoT), leveraging LoRa's Low Power Network(LPN). Swisscom will be leveraging its existing transmitter sites under the broadcast network, aiming to cover 80% of Switzerland’s population by the end of this year. It also plans to provide partial indoor coverage in ten cities.
Swisscom aims to use the LPN technology for a wide variety of deployments, including for smart cities, energy-efficient buildings, machine-to-machine networking and new digital applications. In addition, it also plans to use this technology for parking management, optimization of city collection routes, smart letterboxes and smart heating meters that can transmit the current meter reading directly to the real estate agency for exact billing.
In combination with the Swisscom Cloud, users of the new network can develop new business models and service offerings that are based on the Internet of Things, said Swisscom. Over 100 companies, public authorities and universities have shown an interest in the pilot project, which was launched in spring 2015 in Geneva and Zurich.
Christian Petit, Head of Swisscom Enterprise Customers
In many cases, we only need devices to be able to transmit the smallest units of information. This is precisely why we are setting up this network: in order to efficiently network objects such as fire hydrants, bicycles, umbrellas and much more.
